I try to keep my life fairly logical. It's a logic that treats emotions and beliefs as real things, mind, so to a certain flavor of STEM-lord sort it doesn't qualify, but honestly human beings feel emotions and hold beliefs, and pretending otherwise is, well... illogical.

My religious beliefs are constructed according to that logic, from a few foundational concepts. At their most basic, there are three.

1. There is a God.2. God created this universe.3. God communicates to humans through visions and spiritual experiences.

I can't prove them. My only evidence for them are said spiritual experiences, and that gets a bit recursive. I recognize that I may be wrong. But I prefer to believe these things are correct. And if they are, several things immediately follow.

So here I am, building some kind of personal little religion on my own. I'm having to go back to just those first three things and start all over again. I currently have no idea what I believe about a lot of stuff. It's a weird, unsteady, standing-on-quicksand kind of feeling.

But I'll take it over letting myself be misled by leaders who put bigotry and obsession with sin ahead of love any day.

So today is my birthday (that's not the announcement), and I keep forgetting that it is and then being reminded. I celebrated it on Wednesday, because too much is going on this weekend.

One thing that went on this weekend was that I got a positive pregnancy test*.

Yep. Baby. Baby is a thing that will be happening. I am pretty excited, needless to say.

This will affect my sewing business a bit, though. Assuming that it's a normal pregnancy, nothing goes wrong, I don't need to be put on bed rest, etc. I should be able to finish all my current commissions pretty much as scheduled. The baby is due in March, which coincidentally is when my commission list is full until. Pregnancy won't keep me from sewing, so all those projects should get done. Any future projects that people commission going forward, though, will be happening during "brand new baby that I need to care for" time, and thus I will be unable to offer any guaranteed deadlines of any kind.

I will still be taking commissions, and I will still guarantee that they'll be finished eventually, but I have no idea how much actual work time I'll have and how much time the baby will suck up, and how long it'll be before I have the energy to do anything like my normal work load. I don't make promises I can't keep, so I just won't be promising any deadlines at all for some time.

Anyhow, this is still pretty awesome, even if it is going to turn my life upside down. But I figured I should let people know. :3

*A few of you may be confused because I have answered to "he" and "him" and so on. I am "genderqueer", to use the simplest possible term for it. I'm totally happy with people assuming I'm male, I feel very masculine most of the time. Right now, for obvious reasons, I'm feeling more like a woman than usual. :D But male pronouns are still fine. Or female. Either way, really, I don't mind.

Well okay, not "last", since I will still be making pony plushes after the kickstarter is over, but if you want to back and get a plush this year rather than sometime next year, now's the time. The campaign ends Sunday afternoon, so you have just two days left to back.

And, in even more exciting news, we just reached the draconequus stretch goal! That means you can get Discord, or an OC draconequus, at any reward tier from $50 on up. I do not have examples of the one foot or three foot sizes, or of the bat pony version, as I haven't made any yet, but the Loonakit and beanie pictured here should give you some idea of what to expect.

Yep, I'm kickstartering again. Kickstarting? Kicking? Whatever it is, I'm doing it. With pony plushes this time, because it's about fricking time I get an embroidery machine, but every time I think I've scraped up the money for one, something happens. This way the means to get one and the obligation to get one are tied together, and thus the end result will be that I actually get one.

Assuming it funds that is. Which is where you guys come in. Please go check it out!

So I just got the final word from Everfree, and I won't be getting a booth there. I have to say I'm really disappointed. Personally, I very much enjoy Everfree, but I can't afford to go unless I'm selling. Business-wise it's a real blow, too. But hey, every cloud has a silver lining, so for you guys this means a couple of things:

1. I you have commissioned me already and are on my project list, I can bump up one or two people into the now-empty space I've got over the next few months. So if you'd like to get your project done early, please contact me. There *will* be a rush fee of 15% of your total commission cost for this, though. (I can't bump up everyone, so charging a fee seems like the best solution. I mean, everyone may end up getting bumped a little, just in a chain reaction sort of thing, but I can't fit the whole next year's worth of people into this immediate completion space.)

2. I can also take one or two new commissions, (plush, fursuit, giant plush, whatever!) to be finished right away. So if you'd like to commission me and my usual year-ish wait time has been holding you back, you should jump on this now! As above, there will be a small extra charge for the fast completion time.

3. My webstore is open, selling most of the things I *was* going to be taking to the convention. A few of them are even already started, so they'd ship out even faster than usual. Please check it out. The prices there include shipping inside the USA, even, so they're a pretty good deal. No extra rush charges for these guys! http://sparkcostumes.com/store.php

I'll be uploading some photos and plugging the store a bit over the next few days, as I'd really like to get more business through there.

Please don't hesitate to ask if you have any questions about any of this!

Back from the gym. It was the kind of day where I was pushing it a bit on every exercise, which is frankly fantastic. I feel slightly wobbly and just a bit high. :3 It is awesome.

I was talking about this a bit with JJ earlier today. It's an unfortunate side effect of stupid gender roles that until relatively recently it never occurred to me that I might love weight lifting. I was presented by society with the options of frilly girly-girl, or geeky, frumpy outcast, basically, so I picked the latter because I despised the former. Yet my childhood was really physically active, and I should have naturally been interested in things like lifting, even if I'm not social enough to love group sports, but I just... never though I'd like it. Even with how much I've tried to reject gender roles, I was still not examining the idea that weight lifting is for stupid, meaty jock men without two brain cells to rub together.

Not even! Lifting is the most mentally stimulating form of exercise I've ever run into. Everything else I've tried has bored me to tears. This is endlessly interesting, engaging, thoughtful, fascinating, and has made me aware of my body in ways I've never been before.

It's also basically saving my sanity right now, as it's all that's keeping me from sliding down into an endless pit of depression.

I'm doing pretty well, and it feels really great. Today's accomplishment was kind of a funny one. Somebody left the barbell for deadlifts with 45lb plates on them, which almost made me call JJ over to help me get them off, but I ended up doing it myself, which involves holding 45lbs of bar in one hand, and pushing around 45lbs of weight with the other, and actually turned out to be super-easy, even though I couldn't do that at all when I started. (And I deadlifted 85 today!)

The growing amounts I'm lifting is nice, but it's just also nice to notice that moving the plates around keeps getting easier and easier. :3

I am basically in the process of getting screwed. It's all the more "fun" for being drawn out over the course of more than a month, before everything will be settled and I'll know exactly how bad the situation is.

Now I am going to crawl into bed and try to sleep, for not nearly enough time, before getting up and trying to look normal at church tomorrow because frankly I'm kind of sick of people at church offering me stupid platitudes, no matter how well meant, whenever I have a problem, and fussing at me to let them help when they can't help, and then (more joy) I get to feel guilty for brushing them off and shutting them down. Urgh. (Seriously. Offer to help once, TAKE IT GRACEFULLY WHEN THEY SAY NO, otherwise you are just going to add to the problem.)

Guh. If I hadn't missed last week, I'd be tempted to just skip the damn thing entirely this week.

So I am lifting weights these days. :D And by "these days" I mean "for the last two weeks."

It's been fun, frankly. I really like it, and I look forward to having great arms instead of noodly, middle-aged-lady arms, which I currently have. (And, you know, other muscles and things, but I *do* have decent legs already, it's the arms that I've always found lacking.)

It's also *really* surreal, though. What the heck am I doing in the weight room at the gym? Srsly, what? I haven't set foot in a weight room since a high school gym unit on weights 20 years ago. People like me do not belong in weight rooms!

It's not a gender thing, either, there are other girls there, and it's not like I've felt I was too girly a girl to lift. I am not a girl girl, I never have been! It's more that I've been a *nerd*. Nerds read books and have arguments about superheroes, they don't lift. Dudebros lift. Whatever it is you call those aggressively fit ladies that could break me in half without even trying lift. Nerds like me do not lift.

Except I guess I do. I *like* it, even.

Still, it's just so incredibly surreal. I just got advice on a problem I've been having from schwarzenegger.com, for frick's sake. In what world does a person like me visit the governator's bodybuilding-centric site? Srsly, that's weird, weird, weird.

But it feels good, and I'm going to keep doing it. I don't plan on being one of those piles of lady-muscle, but I do plan on being able to flex and tell that I've done so. :D

It doesn't feel like it's been Christmas this year. I guess not much holiday stuff happened. I didn't have any presents to open today, and there was no tree or any of that... just ham and potatoes with the inlaws. Nice, but pretty low-key.

It probably doesn't help that I've sent most of the day watching American Ninja Warrior. :D Not my usual holiday tradition, but fun.

The Solstice felt like a holiday, so I wasn't robbed or anything... but it's just kind of strange.